Stop Vista From Using A Hard Drive

[Vince4Amy]

I have three Hard Drives in my setup:

2x 160GB Drives

1x 80GB Drive

All Hard Disk drives are SATA. Vista is using the two 160GB hard Drives. One is Drive C:\, the other one is a storage drive.

The Third hard drive (80GB) is formatted to EXT3 and it contains an install of Ubuntu Linux. The problem is, Vista will spin up this hard drive and it will be running the entire time Vista is in use (I Could make the Hard Drives spin down when not active, but this means that the 160GB storage drive will spin down, because of the times the Storage drive is used I do not want it to spin down the drive as it is not good for it in the long run.

In other words I would like the 80GB drive to just spin down when Vista is started and not to be used at all by Vista. Because of what I said above I can't use the Spindown after a certain period of time option because it affects the Storage drive too.

[fizban2]

I have three Hard Drives in my setup:

2x 160GB Drives

1x 80GB Drive

All Hard Disk drives are SATA. Vista is using the two 160GB hard Drives. One is Drive C:\, the other one is a storage drive.

The Third hard drive (80GB) is formatted to EXT3 and it contains an install of Ubuntu Linux. The problem is, Vista will spin up this hard drive and it will be running the entire time Vista is in use (I Could make the Hard Drives spin down when not active, but this means that the 160GB storage drive will spin down, because of the times the Storage drive is used I do not want it to spin down the drive as it is not good for it in the long run.

In other words I would like the 80GB drive to just spin down when Vista is started and not to be used at all by Vista. Because of what I said above I can't use the Spindown after a certain period of time option because it affects the Storage drive too.

Would it be viable to just remove the drive in question from disk management?